A LIFE PLAN CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE BOOK
BY SARAH LAMMER
LET ME SET THE SCENE FOR YOU. YOU ARE A SENIOR
AT A WELL-KNOWN ART SCHOOL ON THE EAST COAST.
YOU’VE BEEN RUNNING A NEW STUDENT GALLERY/
ART SPACE IN DOWNTOWN PROVIDENCE CALLED
EXPOSÉ, WHICH YOU CO-DIRECT WITH ONE OF YOUR
BEST FRIENDS. YOUR ROOMMATE IS AN ASPIRING
FILMMAKER. YOU ARE FAIRLY AMBITIOUS, AND HAVE
WIDE INTERESTS, ESPECIALLY FILM, DRAWING, AND
FOOD.
TRY TO DO SOMETHING INTERESTING, WON’T YOU?
START WITH ONE OF THE FOLLOWING EIGHT PATHS
FOR THE NEXT 9 MONTHS AT RISD AND READ ON AS IT
LEADS YOU THROUGH THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS.

PATH ONE

You decided to dedicate your entire year to Exposé; and
nothing else. You become obsessed, a total square with the
hots for a good business plan and conservative purchasing.
You fail too many classes. You try to argue that business
notes can be your thesis project. You lose your personality.
Exposé is taken over by total nerfs that run it like an inviteonly warehouse show. You stay in Providence taking classes
to get enough credit to graduate. The failings of the new
“cool” Exposé team really puts a fly in your cheerios every
time you see a confusing and mildly condescending poster for
a new show around town.

Go to Page 2
PATH TWO

You balanced your own work with the Exposé biz and
succeeded in passing it down to trustworthy directors. You
are pretty happy with what you’ve done with your work. You
made a sweet short film that played at the Senior Show in
FAV and put on a killer solo show of drawings and prints at
Exposé. You even have a couple cool zines and do some work
for Mothers News. Exposé was crushingly difficult at times,
but you made a ton of potentially career-making connections,
and helped make the space never boring or pretentious.
Perhaps you are even asked to speak at commencement. Also
you decided to keep your little cat, Pierre, who no longer has
ringworm. You are offered a couple opportunities from people
you followed up with through Exposé. You also apply for a
job at McSweeney’s publishing in California. Go to Page 3 to
sequester yourself with your co-director. Go to Page 4 to get
the job at McSweeneys.

Go to Page 5 to stay in Providence.

PATH THREE

You discover an incredible and now obvious solution to
unlocking the key to your fine arts work after coming to after
a severe head injury acquired in a bicycle accident. You
lose interest in Exposé and most of your friends and work
constantly on your new oeuvre.

Go to Page 6
PATH FOUR

You fall in love with the traveling buddhist-doctorbonsaigardener-artist-homebrewer up the street, and run
away to Indonesia.

Go to Page 9
PATH FIVE

Exposé failed, or at least was crushingly mediocre. Your
perception of yourself plummets and you graduate quietly,
unfulfilled and friendless.

Go to Page 12
PATH SIX

Exposé fails. I mean really fails. Everyone hates it. You lose
your cookies and go on a freaky rampage, running fromstudio
to studio destroying artwork in ripped children’s clothing
and screaming bloody murder. Your co-director totally goes
berserk and burns down 2ndLife and Exposé and attempts
to take a chunk of downtown Providence with it. You pull
her into a stolen VW Rabbit hatchback as she is applying a
hairspray-and-lighter flamethrower to the wig store across the
street and gun it out of the city, the police hot on your tracks,
Paolino and his slumlord mob soon to follow.

Go to Page 13 to head South.
Go to Page 19 to head North.

PATH SEVEN

The well-connected anarchist you’ve been having a fling
with wants to turn it into a deeper situation. Things start
to get a little too heavy and you cut out. He doesn’t take it
well at all. All of Providence is suddenly against you. You
can’t leave the house without passing cyclists dressed in
only shades of black and brown throwing empty beercans
and manifestos at your face and calling you a heartbreaking
fascist. With difficulty, (living in studio) you finish well at
RISD, taking animation classes to hide from your tormenters.
Someone else takes over Exposé. Emily grudges you eternally
for ruining Loui’s for her and Isaac. You leave Providence
immediately after graduation.

Go to Page 16
PATH EIGHT

You’ve been pouring yourself into your work, and your
appearance has really suffered. You wear the same
progressively dingier jeans and t-shirt every day, and all
your shoes are coming apart and covered in ink. Before you
graduate, your friends emphatically encourage you to dress
better if you ever want to make it big after school.

Go to Page 27 to take their advice and stay in school.
Go to Page 28 to look fabulous and drop out.
Go to Page 29 to disregard their fashion tips.

PAGE 2
You snoop around the gallery, coming in sometimes and
looking disdainful and asking a lot of pointed questions. You are
eventually banned from the space when you have made it a routine
to come in everyday to weep silently at whichever student is
unfortunate enough to be working the desk. Luckily, your tiny cat,
who miraculously you were able to keep alive through school, catches
the attention of a wealthy cat show officiator. You begin a fulfilling
career as a show cat breeder with Pierre by your side. You get a show
on Animal Planet which is pretty fun although you know you are often
portrayedas slightly disturbed and lonely. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 3
You and your co-director, still delirious from the success of
your art space/gallery, begin to feel the shocking void of work after
RISD graduation. You hole yourselves and a couple other school
chums up in a remote little house in Warwick, Mass and convert
it into your temporary studio, filling it with your grandmother’s old
shag carpeting and mod furniture. You work part time at a pizza
joint and start getting some voiceover work online, and your codirector does some work as a freelance personal shopper for a
few rich folks around town. You are bored enough to make good
work, and busy enough to get along well. You throw raucous parties
that few can make it to, but meet some unexpectedly interesting
characters from around town and entertain visiting friends from
school. Throughout the year, you and your makeshift collective
make some cool stuff. You produce several good zines. You get
fired from the pizza joint when they discover you’ve been smuggling
your zines in with the delivered pies. With the money you’ve
made from online voiceover jobs, phone-sex hotlines, the pizza
place, some freelance writing, and zine sales, you rent a space in
Queens. You ship yourselves and your new work to NY and you
both move there and reunite with another good friend who now
runs a community garden and an eccentric lunch and dinner spot.
You invest in a Risographprinting machine and begin to establish
a small publishing press, mostly for your own work, but renting out
printing time for the public as well. You make pocket money with
more voiceover jobs. Your voice has started to become somewhat
widespread as American English Female in Japan. You continue
to work with your co-director on a joint project, and slowly your
studio becomes more well known in the young art scene. You and
your best friend are trying to make some Gilbert & George-style
artworks, but it’s hard with so many other things going on. Seeking
advice, you both end up working in apprentice positions with Tom
Sachs and the Neistat brothers (whom you met through an Exposé
guest critic series you both organized) and this sets you on a
clearer path. You work to establish your ideal art space in Queens.
You organize a pirate radio station. Later on, as the space gets
more business from local folks, you open a lunch spot/café in the
space called _______. •

PAGE 4
You get the job at McSweeney’s and fly out there,
harboring intentions to start your own magazine, possibly with
your codirector. You work at the magazine doing drawings for a
couple different publications and eventually get to do a couple
of your own quippy articles with your illustrations. You stay with
your established-artist-cousin in San Francisco, and get to meet
a lot of her cool friends. You still want your own magazine to
captain, and you plan it constantly when you’re off work, using
your new experience of layouts and magazine organizing. You
find likeminded writer and designer types to help you with the
content and organizing, and after a year and a half of hard work
and near breakdowns, you finally print a first edition of ________
magazine. After the first edition you’re pretty wiped out.
Go to Page 17 to recover in isolation
Go to Page 18 to keep toiling at the magazine

PAGE 5
You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get the job- instead you take an offer from
a Johnson & Wales professor you got in contact with from a
friend to work with him on a project to develop the perfect
way to educate children and adults about easy cooking and
the necessity of good food knowledge. You also work part
time for Dan Wood helping with printing jobs and keeping Dan
organized. You occasionally do some of your own prints and
illustrations. You begin work with the JWU or Brown Professor,
doing extensive research and a great deal of drawing of
produce and residential chicken coop maintenance for a future
illustrated book. You apply for a ton of grants to further the
project, get a couple, and this takes you all over the country,
seeing the way America eats. You write and draw along the way
when you can. You are immersed in the project, and you and
the JWU professor do a small talking tour of several schools
and homeless shelters and community gardens. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s received
well, but you feel you need a broader way to teach people that
cooking is not a stupid fad for white middle class food-bloggers.
Go to Page 23 to continue with the collaboration.
Go to Page 24 to branch off.

PAGE 6
People start talking about this drastic personality change
you’ve had, and word gets out about the crazy shit you’ve been
making. A couple curators from New York and Philadelphia
come visit your studio, which is now half of the senior studio
because no one wants to be around you anymore since you’ve
become so unfriendly and manically productive. You quit school
early and get an agent and have a solo show in a new gallery in
Brooklyn. And then another. And another. Your shows begin to
sell out, but making your work is all you care about. Your agent,
on the other hand, is delighted with the monetary situation, and
milks your madness for all it’s worth. You’ve begun to get very
severe headaches and experience occasional black outs. Your
agent continues to push you. The old Italian man who works
at the deli you frequent insists that you seek medical attention
when you collapse in his shop as you are ordering a quarter
pound of sliced sopressata.
Go to Page 7 to take his advice
Go to Page 8 to ignore it.

PAGE 7
After an examination, your doctor tells you your brain is
hemorrhaging and needs immediate surgery to avoid blindness
and death. You go through with the procedure. When you awake
12 hours later with your head dramatically bandaged, it’s as
though the past three years had been acted out by a different
person. You meet your agent and step into your gallery only to
realize that your work is completely distasteful and superficial
to you. You return home to Philadelphia for some mental
rehabilitation (you can’t seem to be able to walk backwards or
see the color green anymore), and dedicate your time to writing
and drawing about your strange experiences of the past 4 years.
It becomes a fairly popular cult comic, and later is published
in a classier compiled edition. You continue to write and draw,
making comics and working at a cafe making very good
sandwiches in Philadelphia. •

PAGE 8
You are struck blind on your walk to the mannequin
warehouse to get materials for a new piece. A taxi kills you
instantly as you wander disoriented into the street. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 9
Living far outside of Jakarta in a remote village, a sinking
feeling begins to set in. Your betrothed has been out of the hut
a lot and the conversation and non-conversation between you
hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been as captivating as it was initially. It was just all too
perfect, wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it...
Go to page 10 to stick it out
Go to page 11 to get outta there.

PAGE 10
You stick it out with the still extremely good-looking
gardener and turn your focus to helping him figure out the
perfect way to graft hops and cannabis plants together. Your
relationship is rocky at best, but the THC IPA you brew together
is pretty successful. You export it to Europe to great success;
new buyers are demanding it constantly. Even with the great
writeup in High Times, you are unhappy. You finally crack when
you come home from the village with the weekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rice and ginger
root to find your botanist beau entertaining three local girls on
your woven mat bed. You completely lose it and try to machete
all their heads off. Despite being twisted off homebrew, your
lover is too quick for you, and you manage only to clip off a
couple toes before he takes away the machete and tells you
to whoa baby, chill out. One of the local girls, also blind with
jealousy, cracks a full bottle of beer over your head, and you
are rendered unconscious and soaked with award-winning
homebrew. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 11
Living with the Bonsai gardener in your rickety shack
becomes intolerable. You move to Yogyakarta, the cooler
Indonesian city, which you hear has a thriving art scene and
excellent street food from a puppeteer friend of yours. There
you meet a charming Japanese chef. You follow Yukihiro back
to Tokyo and he gets you a job working part time making
plastic food for window displays at his restaurant while you take
rigorous Japanese lessons at a university. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 12
While you are packing up your junk in Providence, you suddenly
realize as you are winding up your string collection that it is all, in fact,
junk that you own. Disgusted more than ever by your gross consumer
ism and unnecessary accumulation of materials that only remind you
of your failed endeavors, you donate everything to 2ndLife and burn
most of your artwork. You sell enough furniture and supplies to pay for
a one-way ticket to Tibet. You speak to no one and climb mountains
searching for monasteries, surviving only on berries and boot leather.
You finally find a monastery that feels right and sit resolutely on the
floor until a monk agrees to teach you to behave properly and seek
understanding through rigorous meditation. For seven years you study
the universe through your own consciousness and the collective nonverbal knowledge of the monks. One day, after a powerful meditation
session, you have an overwhelming need to return to your previous
life in the ‘States. When you return to the U.S. and arrive in New York,
you see some of your early RISD drawings displayed in an exhibition
window in Chelsea, being sold for a fair chunk of change. You shrug,
remembering your teachings of the past 7 years, and understand that
ownership is a creation of the mind and therefore irrelevant to the
enlightened. You continue on your barefoot journey through the city.
You stay with an old friend from high school who you know will not ask
too many questions. During the day, you offer earnest advice to people
at the park in exchange for donuts and latté dregs. Later that year, a
well-dressed androgynous photographer offers money for the chance
to do a photo-shoot of you. You say you do not take money, but you
will do it in exchange for vegetables and conversation. Mr. Mcginley,
looking for a new direction after years of pretty youths floating around
in dream worlds with kittens is very receptive to your perspectives on
the world and becomes somewhat obsessed with you as a subject,
although you are a little rough around the edges these days. You often
meditate in his studio and have a reliable supply of fresh vegetables
in exchange for your time. Late that year, the photographer publishes
a ground-breaking series of life-size photos of you. The series is
received extremely well for the most part, and you become an
unintentional anonymous celebrity in the high art photography world.
Mcginley, still taking meditation lessons from you, buys you a rooftop
garden on an immensely tall apartment building where you spend
many years. You keep bees and occasionally take in curious visitors
from the lower floors who find your jars of raw honey in the elevators. •

PAGE 13
The Police have alerted local authorities to your
misdemeanors and you have several narrow escapes involving
entertaining several lonely sheriffs and stealing their watches
and wallets. You eat nothing but burgers and pie all the way
down through the southern states, and adopt a variety of
different accents and disguises to prevent detection. You blast
through the border fence in a magnificent leap off a makeshift
ramp of dried cacti and broken down motorcycles, to great
applause from the dozens of hopeful immigrants on the other
side. You arrive in the big city after staying a few cold nights
huddled in the car parked outside dusty tiny towns that are
really just a gas station and a taco stand. Your co-director does
not care for the spicy food, but you call her a wuss a lot and she
eventually adjusts to ever-present chili peppers. You start a two
person collective under new names, making really nuts work
that hardly anyone ever sees, because technically you are still
on the run. But you need money, so you...
Go to Page 14 for the culinary solution.
Go to Page 15 for a different sort of enterprise.

PAGE 14
...start taking in tourists as a bed and breakfast with
exceptional food served by two mysterious and offish
artisttypes. The work you are making together is gaining
momentum, and as the years pass, you bitterness towards the
art world dwindles and you are able to convince your co-director
to organize your new work into a show to put on display in your
now sprawling complex in the outskirts of the city. Later in life,
your tandem art careers (under new names) take off in Mexico
first and then the U.S. and South America. You continue to
Gilbert & George your way through the art world, having a pretty
awesome time. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 15
...get into dirty business in a drug ring in Mexico City. As
you bite into your last juicy yet piquant carnitas taco, you are
knifed in the gut by a competing gang member. Your handsome
and troubled lover weeps over you noisily as you speak softly of
hunting wild boars in winter. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 16
Your degree project animation places well in a couple
student animation festivals, and you pursue an offer to work at
a studio in California. (It’s not Pixar). It doesn’t pay super well,
so you apply for several waitressing jobs. The vegan joint down
the block doesn’t hire you because you do not have enough
piercings and let slip your deep suspicions of tofurky and fakin’
bacon. Low on cash, you end up staying with your roommate
from RISD in L.A. while you work far too hard at the animation
studio. She has been working as an assistant production
designer for an upcoming independent film by a pretty
wellknown independent director. Being on set with her is pretty
sweet, but the whole L.A. vibe is really not your thing.
Go to Page 21 to stick with the studio.
Go to Page 22 to move to New York for work.

PAGE 17
You spend a year or two in recovery working at your
cousinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old residency job outside SF. You love the mountain
and read and draw tons, and go into the city on errands for the
artists staying at the residency. You slow down and recalculate,
making new art and writing, and cooking all the time. You make
a lot of cool artist friends and learn a lot about whether or not
youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to jump into the fine arts world. You start working at
a small printshop in the city, and start putting together a small
newspaper. The people at the shop really enjoy it, and you
continue to write and draw the underground weekly, bringing
in new collaborators. You meet one of these collaborators as
you are watching him draw on the BART and end up getting
sandwiches with him at the next stop. You work on the paper
together for a while, finally profess your love for each other, and
write an R. Crumb/Aline K.Crumb-style comic book. Later, you
move to Seattle, have an unattractive yet talented child, and
catch up with an old friend working at Light in the Attic Records.
Much later in life, you move to some extremely romantic foreign
locale and enjoy cult celebrity for your writing and collaborative
comic work back home.â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 18
You continue to toil at the independent magazine. If your
codirector has joined you in this effort, your friendship is being
constantly challenged with design quarrels and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re both
really tired and wigged out all the time, and hate working on
computers constantly. To save your friendship and sanity more
than anything else, you put the next edition on hold (with some
convincing of your co-director) and decide to travel for a little
while. You pack your bags and head off for a WWOOF-ing trip.
Go to Page 20

PAGE 19
As you blast out of Providence down 95, two white Cadillacs
spiked with a mass of hairy forearms clutching berettas closely tail
you. As reliable as the VW Rabbit is, this particular model seems more
concerned with obeying the speed limit than evading bloodthirsty
crooks. The two Caddys begin to pull up next to you, each driven
by a Paolino brother grimacing happily and blasting Downtown by
Petula Clark. Your co-director tries to blast them with her hairdresser’s
flamethrower, but manages only to set fire to your shirt and singe off
your eyebrows. Weaving dangerously down the middle lane, shrieking
as your co-director attempts to put out your flaming shirt with the
melted blue-raspberry Slushie in the cupholder, you somehow dodge
traffic, the Caddys spraying clouds of bullets in your direction.
Careening towards Massachusetts, the thugs pound at the back of
your car until you lose control and spin out onto the shoulder. With
no time to lose, and little to live for, you and your co-director tumble
out and sprint past the mechanics shop and into the abandoned
drive thru theater. A brilliant idea hits you- the paintball course they
had been building appears to be up and running- you burst into their
supply room, half-naked and breathless with terror and adrenaline,
topple over the acne’d teen behind the counter and suit up for battle,
paintball rifle slung over your shoulder, game face on. You hear the
gruff shouts of the landlords’ thugs outside, and you sneak out back
into the course, hidden behind palette-wood obstacles. The thugs are
being pelted with zings of color from the kids on the course, oblivious
to the danger. Enraged, one of the brothers opens a round into the air
and everyone screams and scatters into the woods. The thugs kick
over the obstacles one by one, getting closer and closer. A strange
fearlessness overwhelms you, and you suddenly stand and open fire,
blinding a few goons with furious neon pink and orange accuracy.
Still firing frantically at the thugs, a volley of bullets reaches you, and
you shimmy dramatically like a little art-school-girl version of Sonny
Corleone. You die with a crazed victorious smirk on your face. Your
co-director has somehow managed to escape the gruesome scene,
hitching a ride off the highway. She makes it out of the country, and,
under a new name, starts a rather successful design company in
Norway, never speaking of the past, but always weeping silently when
she’s had a few too many at the ice bar. •

PAGE 20
You drop everything and fly out to Sweden to do some
unwinding over organic lingonberry harvesting. Upon arrival at
your Swedish host’s farm, you are greeted with a throng of jolly
young Swedes, all wearing a clover-flower chain and not much
else. You are both handed a varmt glas of mulled vin, and then
another, and you happily live and work with the nudist varmers
in varmland for the next month and a half. After tearful naked
goodbyes, you pack your bags, or rather stash a dozen jars of
lingonberry wine and preserves in amongst your crisply folded
unused clothes, and head out for the airport. Dåvid pleads with
you to stay, but you know you have to carry on in America. You
return the US and your magazine work, refreshed and on the
right track again. After many charmingly worded letters back
and forth, Dåvid travels all the way to the West coast to be with
you. •

PAGE 21
You start helping out making props and some scenery
and sometimes take off work to help out on set. You meet
someone who gets you some voiceover jobs for $. You ditch
the animation gig; they are starting to outsource a lot of their
drawing to Korea. You work alongside your roommate and
start to get paid a little for your scenery and prop work. Finding
yourself with a great deal of free time, you wander the studios
when your roommate is busy with production designer stuff,
and you’ve finished re-painting the set’s walls for the umpteenth
time. You stumble upon the set of a kids’ TV show, and sneak
inside to watch. Hey, I could do that better than him, you say
to yourself as the host speaks with a malevolent peppiness
into the camera and men in pink and blue bunny suits “frolic”
behind him. Inspired, you work diligently at the studio, slowly
and steadily moving up in rank and pay. Commended around
the studio for being daring in both physical feats (climbing
tall ladders, getting yourself electrocuted) as well as social
confidence (tactfully informing the set director when he is doing
something idiotic), you make enough connections and $ to start
your own venture.
Your kids TV show is very small scale at first; you narrate,
animate, and act in the show as much as possible, and have
a solid crew of happy weirdos to make it really great. It starts
out quietly, only streaming online, until an unknown 3D cable
channel picks you up. It quickly gains popularity, among kids
and kid-like adults, and you have a total blast doing it for the
years to come. You fall in love with one of the puppeteers, which
turns out to be far less disturbing than you’d thought it would
be. •

PAGE 22
You go to New York City, driven to find success in the
film industry. After more than several attempts at good work
and a few fun but money-burning nights out, frankly, success
just isn’t coming to you as easily as you’d imagined it would.
You have to get a full time job as a waitress at a bustling
downtown restaurant and bar to make rent on your friend’s
broom closet you’ve been sleeping in (standing up). Competition
for tips among the waitresses is tight. You acquire a sticky
coke habit to keep up with the other girls. Your first crop of
enhanced-performance lounge and bar tips is spent on more
tip-making powder and several rounds of margaritas for the
girls, with just barely enough to cover rent. You continue to
over-enthusiastically wait tables at the lounge & bar until one
hectic night you’re caught by the manager, craning over a
serving platter in the back with two Benjamins from the register
crammed up your nostrils. Now jobless in New York, and too
ashamed of yourself to call up any old friends, you sleep hidden
under a couch in a Barnes & Noble, and begin the search for
new work the next day.
Years later, unfortunate decisions coupled with
experiments with homemade stimulants have crumpled your
brain a bit. Your friends have grown famous and successful
around you while you make Philadelphia Hoagies To-Go in
cheap hoop earrings at the Port Authority Greyhound terminal. •

PAGE 23
You return to Providence to further flesh-out your plans for
the project with the professor. You begin to realize that he may
have some other ideas in mind involving your flesh, and after
an unpleasant groping incident at the farmers market, you slap
him across the face with a fistful of swiss chard and quit the
project. Finished with Providence and the unpleasant gentlemen
of academia, you leave for the West coast, eventually settling
in Vancouver. Through a strange series of connections, you
inherit a small Angora rabbit farm from an elderly lady friend.
You apparently have a real knack for combing out rabbit fur, and
bring in a fair amount of money through an Etsy store and the
local yarn sellers. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 24
You decide to branch off on your own personal side
project after learning a great deal from the professor and the
extensive touring of American culinary centers and wastelands.
Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a welcome break of independence (that professor was
starting to seem a little too touchy anyway), but the going is
hard, and you have to put aside time around your bartending job
at AS220 to write and research and illustrate. Just for the hell
of it, you apply for that Slow Food University Fulbright grant in
Northern Italy.
Go to Page 25 to get the Fulbright.
Go to Page 26 to stay in Providence.

PAGE 25
You get the Fulbright grant, and go to Italy to enroll at the
Slow Food University in Bra, Italy. You arrive at the school in a
rundown orange cab and are greeted by a dilapidated complex
of buildings and a freckly girl with a basket of produce. You
ask her in broken Italian if she knows where the admissions
office is, and she responds in Georgia-twanged English, Owh,
ahre you uh new stuudent heyer? Suuper! and hands you a few
fingerling potatoes and fresh spinach. You settle in, and spend a
happy week relaxing amongst the pretty Italians in the town and
the intoxicatingly idyllic local cuisine. You also begin to realize
that the Universitรก is a little more relaxed than you anticipated.
Classes are infrequent and teachers either unreliable or
incomprehensible. Your classmates appear to be almost
exclusively middle-class white American ladies with food blogs,
and you become increasingly resentful of their fantasy escapist
attitudes. Toward the end of your frustrating but delicious time
there, you fall in with a group of beautiful Italians from the town
over. You accelerate your graduation and stay in Italy with your
new friends, having frequent dramatic triangular romances. โข

PAGE 26
You don’t get the grant, but you had been beginning to
second-guess the value of a group of upperclass white people
fawning over Italian fantasy-land cuisine, escaping America’s
own issues. After another year and a half, a rough draft of
your co-authored book is ready for publishing. A young and
like-minded publishing house picks it up, and it is published
according to your wishes (no expensive hard-cover and no
hipster-mom appealing cover art), and distributed cheaply
and widely up and down the East coast. It does well, and you
promote it like crazy, doing talks and blogs and interviews if
you get them. Distribution widens westward, into those “food
wastelands” you visited two years before. You know that a
book in the modern era probably isn’t going to change the
world, and also begin podcasting and hiring people to work on
an accessible website for you as well. It does very well, and
Jonathan Safran Foer gets in contact with you to do a joint
project (perhaps a film). You realize your dream of starting a
small lunch & breakfast spot called _____. Many years later, you
settle down to get a food & philosophy radio show on NPR.
After your death, a sandwich is named after you at the lunch
spot: The Slammwich. •

PAGE 27
You follow their fashion-is-power advice, and buy a
new wardrobe, subtle tones with occasional color accents,
tasteful accessories, complete with a daring pair of heeled
leather boots. You look fantastic and powerful. The day after
graduation, you start down the stairs you always take to studio,
laden with bags of luggage from your apartment, slip in your
brushed leather, wooden-heeled, stylishly angled boots, and fall
to your death. â&#x20AC;˘

PAGE 28
After you clean yourself up, trim your unwanted hair,
get a new wardrobe, and paint your nails, all of a sudden you
become so unbelievably good-looking that everyone wants to
bone you. You walk down the street, it’s all like, “EEEYYYYY
baaayyy beeee,” and “Whatchu doin tonight, honey??” At the
mall, the heavily foundationed woman with the clipboard and
Bump-it in her hair asks you, “Hiyouaresogorgeous have you
ever considered modeling???” You flip your hair, utterly failing to
look demure, and say, “Well gosh, I mean I guessss haha!” Your
undeveloped ego suddenly explodes with selfish vanity, and
you leave school to pursue modeling. You go on to model foot
creams, toothpastes, deodorant, and all manner of hair-removal
solutions. Later on, you get fat on free cheese platters on set,
get fired, and have a series of plastic surgeries. •

PAGE 29
You dismiss your friends’ advice, and they once again
look at you with bewildered pity as you wipe your dirty hands
on your jeans. You stay in Providence for a few months, getting
fired from jobs when the smell begins to offend the customers.
Businessmen and old ladies start throwing increasingly large
amounts of change in your direction whenever you go outside
for a smoke break on the street. You start to catch on to their
misdirected pity, and in one week you make about 50 bucks.
You ditch your jobs, and start to go from corner to corner of
Providence, making bank as a vagrant. You put on acts of
illness, disability, insanity, and paying for the bus excuses,
getting resentful looks from the homeless regulars of the
choicest blocks. After 6 years, you pay back half of your school
fees. A gang of panhandlers decides they’ve had enough of this
upstart asshole college-grad, and gang up on you as you’re
smearing your face with gutter debris one afternoon. They beat
the shit out of you, and you are forced to escape to Philadelphia
in a body cast, and live in your parent’s house for the next 40
years, sucking away their retirement funds. •